On as I type on BBC 4 - the who have just followed jethro tull and it's all compered by the stones 1968 lineup in a big top. Apparently it's legendary but has never been seen before or something - has anyone else ever heard of this?

Monday, December 06, 2004

Wonder if my nephews will thank me if I buy a goat for some Africans instead of fighting my way through the wild-eyed desperate Hamleys hordes to get them some overpriced plastic Thunderbirds toy for their Christmas.

Monday, November 01, 2004

Further to the ancient bittorrent discussion, I've just discovered uknova.com which links to torrents of British TV and radio media. They've got the first two episodes of "The Power of Nightmares" (I can put them up on fitzroytuesday.homelinux.net if anyone's wanting them for conventional download). Terry Jones Medieval Lives series plus loads of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue also available - fantastic!

Saturday, October 23, 2004

I'm thinking of buying one, preferably with quite a lot of storage capacity, but not too bulky. I know that a lot of techie-minded people are very anti-ipod, but what do they recommend instead? Anyone know?

When young Bush was at Yale in the Sixties, he told the same joke over and over again for two years, according to some of his classmates. One of them still remembers it:

There was a young man named Green
Who invented a jack-off machine
On the twenty-third stroke
The damn thing broke
And churned his nuts into cream.

"It was horrible to hear him tell it," said the classmate, who spoke only on condition of anonymity. He lifted his shirt and showed me a scar on his back put there by young George. "He burned this into my flesh with a red-hot poker," he said solemnly, "and I have hated him ever since. That jackass was born cruel. He burned me in the back while I was blindfolded. This scar will be with me forever."

There is nothing new or secret about that story. It ran on the front page of the Yale Daily News and caused a nasty scandal for a few weeks, but nobody was ever expelled for it. George did his first cover-up job. And he liked it...

"Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis," the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. "Only a fool or a sucker would vote for a dangerous loser like Bush," Dr. Thompson warned. "He hates everything we stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November."

Thompson, long known for the eerie accuracy of his political instincts, went on to denounce Ralph Nader as "a worthless Judas Goat with no moral compass."

"I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next President of the United States."

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams weren't true, neither are these nightmares.

This series shows dramatically how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. It is a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media. At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neoconservatives and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. These two groups have changed the world but not in the way either intended. Together they created today's nightmare vision of an organised terror network. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. Those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.

The rise of the Politics of Fear begins in 1949 with two men whose radical ideas would inspire the attack of 9/11 and influence the neoconservative movement that dominates Washington. Both these men believed that modern liberal freedoms were eroding the bonds that held society together. The two movements they inspired set out, in their different ways, to rescue their societies from this decay. But in an age of growing disillusion with politics, the neoconservatives turned to fear in order to pursue their vision. They would create a hidden network of evil run by the Soviet Union that only they could see. The Islamists were faced by the refusal of the masses to follow their dream and began to turn to terror to force the people to 'see the truth'.

Friday, October 08, 2004

Actually, I had to get Quicktime to play this, and realised how much I hated the damn program. So, if you're sick of Quicktime and Realplayer being just generally crap, go to this site and get Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative. You won't regret it (this is assuming you've got Windows).

Friday, October 01, 2004

Shameless lift from the popbitch mailout. Definitely worth watching though - I deliberately avoided the drama thing last week...
Radiation bombs are a government fantasy

Last week’s BBC drama about a dirty
bomb in London has helped keep everyone
terrified about terrorism.

But a forthcoming documentary shows that
dirty bombs are actually a fantasy. The
Americans should know: the CIA tried for
years to make one, before realising that
blowing up radioactive material won't hurt
anyone. Radioactive dust disperses so
quickly you'd need to be exposed to it
for about a year before any real
damage occurred.

The documentary, The Power Of Nightmares,
shows how politicians are using fake stories
like the dirty bomb to keep people scared,
and themselves in power. It also demonstrates
that the claim that Al-Qaeda is a global,
hidden, terror network is also a myth.

So what channel is this BBC-debunking
documentary showing on? Er, BBC2.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Quite interesting perspective on fallout from Iraq war from a pretty right wing perspective. Though, like a lot of these wankers, he seems to have conveniently forgotten how up for it he was 18 months ago.

Saturday, September 25, 2004

This is quite good - Purple States. Shows republican/democrat vote distribution not as red and blue states but as different shades of purple. Trouble is, i'm too colourblind and can't tell with any certainty which ones were for bush and which ones for gore (it's based on last time round I think).

Friday, September 24, 2004

Britain's 15-year-old girls are amongst the world's
least likely to succeed. They drink more alcohol than any other
15-year-olds on the face of the globe. They are the world's third
largest dope smokers, the fourth most obese and the fifth best at
watching telly.

Sunday, September 12, 2004

new webserver back up online - had a few technical probs with the old platform so have moved to Redhat Fedora 2.0 running on a different machine. this new setup should be a lot more stable (fingers crossed) so should be able to start doing stuff with it this week. not sure what though...

Saturday, September 04, 2004

Thursday, September 02, 2004

Retro vs. Metro - the Great Divide, why the retro states, representing a third of the population and standing for reactionary political values, run America instead of the more progressive, liberal metro ones.

Colin and I have been involved in putting it together, and could do with all the support we can get. It should be a genuinely decent event, with food and drink and literary chat. You don't have to come for the whole afternoon, but the evening networking should be good.

Friday, August 27, 2004

Locking down security is progressing well - should be internet ready by end of the bank holiday if I can devote a few more hours to it.

Next steps will be to setup user accounts and access rights for individual users (if anyone is interested). Can then offer free webhosting plus PHP and MySQL access, and start thinking about setting up a more sophisticated blog.

Could also start thinking about acquiring a proper domain name - I reckon fitzroviantuesdays.com will come in at ~ $25 per year. This would allow me to set up a mail server on another machine for username@fitzroviantuesdays.com addresses...

Life is too shortMy friend's doing the marketing for this great ormond street fundraising campaign. They hope the webpage will spread virally - but it revolves around people getting sponsored to wear jeans to work (?!?) - and most people I know can do that anyway. Most of their supporters are middle aged women, so if you know anyone suitable, please visit the page and forward on the link. Ta.

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Have taken fitzroytuesday.homelinux.net offline for the time being as want to ensure the security is locked down properly.

Once I've done this the next thing will be to think of something to do with it - has anyone got some ideas?

It will be straightforward to register a proper domain name (fitzroviantuesdays.com!) to point at the machine - in fact it shouldn't be *too* difficult to have the apache server running multiple websites on multiple domain names, if anyone has any pet projects...

Monday, August 23, 2004

Thursday, August 19, 2004

I'm sure I mentioned this before, but BLOG:CMS is software for setting up your own blog site. You need PHP installed and MySQL running (as well as web server software obviously!) Only 1 Meg download....it's pretty cool.

Here's a picture of it running, and another which shows what it looks like just with a different stylesheet (or "skin").

Good to get the Fitzroy sessions back on track yesterday. Topics to follow up: John's mindful buddhist conversion, hydrogen power, flavourless tea, Skye bridge, er... memory not serving me well this morning, like John and his pin number.

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Monbiot in Grauniad today, slagging off climate change deniers like David Bellamy. Also inlcudes this interesting take on modern prosperity - "A recent study by the New Economics Foundation suggests that the costs of crime have risen by 13 times in the past 50 years, and the costs of family breakdown fourfold. The money we spend on such disasters is included in the official measure of human happiness: gross domestic product. Extract these costs and you discover, the study says, that our quality of life peaked in 1976. "

Monday, August 09, 2004

Lastminute.com to axe 350 jobs. "Lastminute chairman Allan Leighton said the company, in common with other travel operators, had been affected by a growing tendency for consumers to book their holidays later than usual." Eh? wasn't that supposed to be the whole point?

Further to the webserver project, I tried installing Suse10 on a 500MHz Celeron Sony Vaio with 64MB RAM and the YAST installer tool reported not enough memory! Bah. It did give the option of enabling swap space but I couldn't work out how to make it run fdisk (or similar) to set a swap partition.

Am going to try again with Gentoo 20004.2... Does this sound sensible or is there a better distro for low end machines (Seumas)?

On the project front, I've realised that my broadband router supports Dynamic DNS which means that I will be able to host an (internet visible) webserver. To this end I'm looking at setting up a low end end machine running linux and apache. Not sure when I'll get round to doing this but once its in place it could be a new home for Fitzrovian Tuesdays (fitzroviantuesdays.com anyone?)

'NEWSWEEK reports that President Bush, appearing before a right-to-life rally in Tampa, Florida, on June 17,'04, stated: "We must always remember that all human beings begin life as a feces. A Feces is a living being in the eyes of God, who has endowed that feces with all of the rights and God- given blessings of any other human being." The audience listened in disbelief as the President repeated his error at least a dozen times, before realizing that he had used the word 'feces" when he meant to say "fetus." '

One think always puzzled me about Stephen Hawking Is he a genius whose work will go down in history (e.g. like Bohr, Heisinger, Einsten, Schroeder etc) or is he just one of a thousand or so leading contemporary theoretical physicists who happens to go round in a wheel chair?

Friday, July 02, 2004

How cool is this? I'm amazed it's not bigger news as the implications are pretty stupendous ie "The discovery will lend support to the idea that almost every sunlike star in our galaxy, and probably the Universe, is accompanied by planets."

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Am reading Meyer Hillman's book on How to Save the Planet. Absolutely terrifying - basically, it's immoral to ever fly anywhere on holiday, or do anything else much except read, cycle and farm crops. We are all fucked.

Big Noise Music -- forget iTunes, Oxfam have launched a music download site, with 10% going to charidee. They're also involved in a new chain of fair trade coffee shops (called Progresso, which is a bit of a duff name).

Monday, May 31, 2004

Re: Ecotricity

There seems to be a bit of a windmill backlash building from unexpected sources. A lot of people (including alternative energy types) are saying that they'll never generate enough power. I was thinking about this stuff the other day, and it occured to me that we should be investing loads in providing solar power in Africa -- doing our R&D there and basically giving it away to them in vast quantities. Also, I still think they should add dynamos to treadmills and exercise bikes in gyms across the world...

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Neither John nor myself will be able to make this Second Tuesday. He's off to the sunshine and I'm off to the cold. Anyway, we thought maybe a Final Thursday might do the trick if you're available for that? Thoughts?

Friday, May 21, 2004

Thursday, May 20, 2004

The Onion infographic on Electronic Voting Machines -- includes button sequence for God mode, giving user unlimited votes (R2,L2,Triangle,Circle,R2,R2), and pop-ups reading "People who voted for John Kerry also ordered these products from Amazon.com"...

Sunday, May 09, 2004

Have you seen the End of Story thing they're doing on BBC 3 website? A bunch of authors have written two thirds of a short story, and now they're running a competition to see who can write the best ending...

Friday, May 07, 2004

Don't think I can make it next weekSorry, I've managed to double-book myself. Perhaps we can hold an extra session later in the month? Apart from general socialising, I was hoping to pick your brains about Linux...

Apologies for the lack of promised photoblogging action - I didn't bring my laptop so can't transfer pictures from digital camera to interweb. I've also not taken very many pictures though will try and post a panoramic shot of the East Lothian coast from the hills above Musselburgh (just what this blog needs) when I get back to London.

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

I saw this horrible video of an Apache helicopter shooting Iraqis a few months ago. Something about it didn't seem right - surely it couldn't be real - and I decided that it must be some kind of sick simulation.

In light of all the torture pictures and videos that have come to light in the last couple of weeks, this has been checked out, and apparently it's genuine. My sources tell me it might turn up on the news this week...

As penance for the recent frivolity of my posts, here's an interesting piece by Dick Morris in today's Times about the Bush/Kerry election prospects. More equivocal than his article in the NY Post that I posted the other week, and thus slightly more hopeful for liberals.

Essentially, he says that if terrorism is the main election issue Bush will scrape it, but if the economy or anything else is Kerry should sneak in. The problem is that when something like Faluja is going on, the US electorate get more gung-ho about terrorism, even though Bush actually created the situation in the first place. Thus you get republicans denigrating Kerry because he voted against purchasing the arms which US marines are now using in Iraq -- yet if Bush had never started the bloody war in the first place, they wouldn't need the arms. It's so frustrating how war and jingoism seem to short-circuit people's sense of reason.

Meanwhile the MP3 generation is still in full swing. Just get proper software like CDex.

Devon: The villages of Lynton and Lynmouth are connected with a really cool water powered railway. Lots of details at this site. This is a Must See if you are ever passing that way...

Not talked about, but since I didn't sleep again last night (arghh!) I watched early morning cartoons and....Trap Door is back!!! You remember Trap Door surely? Go here and choose it from the side menu. You know you want to.

Saturday, March 20, 2004

Mass Extinction Not Inevitable

After glancing at the doom laden front page of the Grauniad yesterday and reading the New Scientist article, this interview in Wired has made me feel slightly less depressed about Life on Earth. Hurrah (a bit).

Thursday, March 18, 2004

I'm here. Hungover and tired, with a Guinness hat on top of my monitor. I guess I just didn't have anything of import to say. There is a photo of the pub lunch yesterday but I'll have to wait to get it (it's on a phone ATM).

$500 billion is the figure I see, but I think there's a distinction between deficit and national debt. Deficit is the annual budget over-spend (i.e difference between tax revenues and expenditure). National debt is the aggregate of budget deficits and all the government's other long-term debts, such as war bonds, accrued over years and years.

If you go here, you can make a contribution to paying off the US National Debt!!

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

I'm in danger of revealing how much time I spend online like a sad git in the evenings when I'm pretending to do some extra-curricular work (and impressing/worrying my flatmate with what she imagines to be my work ethic - this is the danger of broadband), but thought I'd better reveal that the internet is shit.

That Onion link below has turned into something else. The one I meant to provide is now in the previous issue, but looks like the link's not permanent. Not that funny, anyway (and Tom, don't open this one in the LDA). Quick, before the next issue comes out...